The Space Between
by hiro7
Summary: Friendship fic featuring Akari and Hotaru. Because there are so few Akari and Hotaru fics out there. Rated PG for some Fwords.


**Author's Notes : **Because I have neglected Hotaru for so long, and because I have just reread all the scanlations I have and the part where Hotaru said that Kyo and Akari are the two most important people in his life... I just have to write this.

I actually tried to make an Akari/xHotaru pairing, but somehow I just couldn't find any plot that could make the pairing work / believable (or maybe because I'm too hung up with KyoxHotaru pairing XD), so I just settled with a friendship fic.

I am pretty happy with the way this fic turned out and I really hope you find this fic believable and enjoyable, because heck, it was such a btch to work on ;;...

Title : The Space Between  
Author : **hirochan**  
Rating : PG  
Pairing : None  
Warning : Some F-word

Akari couldn't believe just how stupid she was.

Letting her mind to wander elsewhere during the battle was the most idiotic thing she could do and she was paying the price now.

She watched in a wide-eyed horror, as she felt the warm wetness of Hotaru's blood splattered on her face and neck, his body thrown from the impact of the attack towards her.

In one moment freezing in time, she saw his thin body freezed in the air, blood sprouting out of the fatal wound from an enemy attack that found its target.

An attack that was meant for her.

All of it just because she fucking lost her fucking concentration in the middle of a fucking battle.

She wanted to kill herself.

The next moment, as the time moved again, she caught Hotaru's bloodied body in her arms, painting her immaculate clothing vivid blood red.

She laid him on the ground, feeling relief as she heard his short, ragged breath – alive, thank God, because even with just a glance Akari could see that the wound was a fatal one - and her shoulders shook and she felt a deep, red hot anger coursing in her.

Her blood painted hand grabbed her staff which had fallen when she caught his fall, and she stood, tall and powerful and mesmerizingly deadly.

She supposed she should pity those scums for being her enemies today. She would kill every single person that dared to cross her path.

_  
Out of the other Shiseiten members, barring Kyo of course, Akari was most intrigued with Hotaru. _

The first thing that attracted Akari to Hotaru was his hair. The first fewdays she had been with them, she just couldn't stop staring at the way his long blonde hair shined so prettily under the sunlight, no matter the situation. And that was saying a lot because Akari never got jealous of anyone's appereance. She was so proud of herself. Of her lustruous pink hair, of her pretty face, of her appereance.

That was the point where she started to give more attention to him.

After that, she started noticing other things about him. Like how pretty he was. She had never seen that kind of beauty before. Akira was boyishly pretty. Akari- she was sure of it – was femininely pretty. Hotaru was unearthly pretty. It was almost like Kyo, but while Kyo was all raw masculinity and hard edges, Hotaru had a softer, almost feminine lines to his appereance.

And everything about him was so mysterious. No one, not even Kyo, knew where he came from, what his motives were, how his past was. All they knew about him was his name.

It was as if he had materialized out of nothing, from nowhere.

It had only been the two of them that day, Akari and Hotaru. The day before, Kyo had decided that it would make things easier if they splitted up into two groups, because they were still wasn't sure which route of the two possible routes available that the enemy troops would take.

She had hoped, as always, to be paired together with Kyo. But just the two of them this time, please. Because the last time they seperated into groups, though she was in Kyo's group, there was also Bon there, and it irked her to no end because she ended up spending her time screaming obscenities at Bon rather than flirting with Kyo.

This time, though, she hadn't been so lucky. She had been paired with Hotaru as Bon gloated at her because he had been in Kyo's group together with Akira. Akari at bristled at this, and seriously considered killing Bon one of these days.

But then, she realized that it was a rare occurrence that she was paired up with Hotaru. And she thought about their friendship which had started to grow, she thought about the way Hotaru no longer pushed her away whenever she tried to be more friendly to him, and decided that it wasn't such a bad arrangement after all.

It was sure much better than being paired with Bontenmaru. Now, that was a scary prospect.

They met the enemy troops the next day, as expected, and they grinned ferally and felt their excitements building in a way that only the Shiseiten could understand.

She hadn't really expected anything out of the routine to happened, and while she acknowledged that their enemy was a strong, powerful one, she did not expect that any of her or Hotaru would suffer any major injuries that would threaten their lives.

That was, of course, until she had somehow lost her concentration during the battle.

_  
With Kyo, it was an easier case. Akari had head over heel fallen in love with him at the first sight, hard. He was gorgeous, inhumanly so, with a badass attitude which strangely attracted her, and that very fact would later rule her in anything concerning him. _

Akira she had taken as her little brother almost instinctively, though she knew full well that Akira hated it. Or at least he said and acted as if he hated it. But sometimes Akari looked below the surface and she saw just how much he relished the feeling of having family, no matter how strange the people were. And so, she dived into the role of a big sister enthusiastically. She teased, cajoled, fooled, made fun of and tortured him all around, because hey, that was what a little brother was for.

Bontenmaru was her arch-enemy. Or so it seemed from the outside. The warred, called each other name-callings, screaming obscenities at each other, but mostly, underneath it all, she thought he had his fatherly moments, and she liked that.

Hotaru was a different case though. Akari thought that he was a loner, either by nature or by circumstances. He always looked set apart, lonely, even in the crowd. It was as if he had this boundary around him where he had all his guards up, which no one could cross. The only one who could breach it was Kyo, and even that, Akari thought, was because Hotaru had let him to. Kyo did have such kind of effect.

There were times when Hotaru would let his guards down, and would make some insensible and random comments on anything, on anyone. Sometimes, Akari would catch him with something akin to awe shining in his eyes when he looked at Kyo. But then, Akari sadly realized, that when she – or anyone else in that matter – tried to get nearer to him in those unguarded moments, his guards would just slam back up again, and he was back to his own lonely world.

Most of the time though, Hotaru was so detached of the others that she felt as if he was in a different dimension altogether.

Like tonight, where he sat alone, bathed in the silvery glow of the moonlight, regal in his solitude.

For some reason, Akari couldn't tear her eyes away from the sight. And she wondered, whether there was any opening for her to go past his guards.

She distantly heard Akira bitching about Hotaru again, cussing for the older boy to just drop dead already. Apparently Hotaru had just thrown away whatever food Akira had managed to spare for him from their rapidly shortening food stack.

She heard Bon trying to calm Akira down, and in the middle of their voices came Kyo's deep voice, strong and clear as a whistle to her ears, as always.

"Leave him be," Kyo said. "He doesn't want to be friends with others. He wants absolute solitude for himself."

Akari didn't understand.

She had spent all her life trying to find friends, to not spend her life alone in solitude. She had no idea that there was someone who wanted to live his life in solitude.

Somehow, Akari felt scared for him.

And she thought that perhaps it was because he didn't know just how awful it was to be all alone. That perhaps he had no idea just how wonderful it was to have friends.

And looking at him, at the way that even when walking together he seemed to be so seperated from the group, Akari decided that she would make Hotaru to realize those facts.

It had been so fucking easy. It was just like walking through a mist.

She swung her staff around and her opponents were falling down like swatted flies.

Too fucking easy.

Oh, they tried everything to hurt and defeat her, but none of them meant a thing.

She wouldn't be defeated. With this kind of blind fury raging inside her, she could not possibly be defeated.

She watched, through the red mist that was clouding her vision, mummies falling down on her feet.

What a handy power the Air Vamp was. Just a chain of mantra, just a light swing of her staff, and she sucked in their souls and that was the end for them.

Her hands hurt out of using the Air Vamp too much, but she could hardly feel it.

She stomp her foot on another mummy.

No one got away after endangering her friends.

Absolutely no one.

_  
Akari stared into his eyes as they fluttered open slowly. As always, those eyes captivated her, in a different way with the way Kyo's majestic blood red eyes enslaved her. _

The eyes she was staring at right now were the purest yellow, with golden specks forming a ring around its pupil. They were unique, and thoroughly captivating.

"How are you feeling?" she asked as those eyes blinked slowly at her.

"I'm not dead," the owner of those eyes rasped, his tone flat, but she could hear a thin layer of wonder in his voice.

"Nope. I patched you up, and you should be good as new in a few days."

He frowned at her. "Why?"

It was her turn to raise her eyebrows. "Because you were heavily wounded and could die if I didn't treat you?"

He shook his head. "Why bother? If I got wounded and died, it must mean that I'm not strong enough. Not good enough. Shouldn't it mean that I'm not good enough to be part of Shiseiten again? Why did you save me?"

Most of the time, Akari couldn't follow Hotaru's line of thoughts, because most of the time, they were too jumbled and too random for her to really make sense of anything. But there were rare moments, moments like now, where something clicked and she understood.

She whacked him on the head. "Shouldn't it be obvious? Because you are my friend, that's why."

She saw those narrow eyes widen, and she smiled inwardly.

She felt like a winner.

The next thing she was aware of was that she was the only one still left standing in the battle field.

It had felt like a dream, as it always was whenever she let her fury get the better of her in the battle. She could only remember in flashes, and here she was, the only one standing.

She picked her way through the sea of mummies that littered the ground towards where Hotaru was. She found him barely conscious, yet she noted that there were quite many opponents lying dead, burnt to the core and she supposed that Hotaru was really a handful even with a terrible injury like this.

She had to smile at his stubbornness.

She sat down, and arranged him so that his head was resting on her lap, and started to check his injuries.

After a couple of gentle proddings, she decided that although pretty bad, it was nothing that she could not fix.

She put one hand on his forehead, and the other on his torso, and with a few practiced mantra, her hands let off a warm glow that soon eveloped the injured boy. She kept the healing glow to keep encasing him until her healer instinc told her that that would be enough and she put her hands away from him.

She looked at him, waiting for him to regain consciousness, to open his eyes again.

He looked so heartbrokenly young, and in the back of her mind she wondered whether that was what they all looked like in that state.

_  
"What should I do to repay you?" _

The question caught Akari off guard, and the only inteligent think that could come out of her lips was an eloquent "Huh?".

"You have saved me, two times now. There must be something I should do to make it even."

Akari rolled her eyes slightly. She realized, in a way that both annoyed and saddened her, that Hotaru probably had no idea of the concept of "friends".

"Friends," she explained patiently, as she would to a little children. And perhaps, that was what Hotaru really was, inside. "Do that without thinking how the other would repay them. It isn't business. It comes out of compassion and care for each other."

The idea might sound ironic, even to her ears, that the legendary Gods of Death like them having discussion about friends, compassion and care. But behind the Gods veil, they were – sadly – still human, and human needed these kind of things. Needed touched of compassion from the other, needed reassurance that they weren't alone to face whatever life had in store for them.

And Akari, above all, valued the friendship very highly.

But Hotaru was nothing if not stubborn, and he asked again. "What should I do to repay you?"

And looking at him like that, Akari just had to wonder about what kind of demented childhood Hotaru had had for him to be like this, to keep batting away hands that were reaching out for him. She wondered whether it had been worse than her own, or something different altogether that she had no idea of.

And that was when it hit her.

She didn't know anything about this young boy sitting in front of her.

An idea came to her mind and she smiled - a bit too sweetly for his taste – at him, leaning closer conspirationally.

"Since you are so eager to pay your debts, then pay me back with your secrets. I know nothing about you but your name and your power. So let's make a deal.."

Those yellow eyes stared imploringly at her, although she was sure that he must know already where this was going.

"One story, one secret for a healing. That will be my price."

He came to with a gasp.

"Akari-chan," he rasped, and she just had to smile at the term of endearment. Hotaru had taken to calling her "Akari-chan" not so long ago, surprising everyone, even Kyo, and for a strange reason, Akari felt a smug pride over it.

"You're going to be okay," she said gently.

"This is so embarassing," he moaned as he attempted to sit.

"It is not," Akari said sternly. "I'm sorry that I was so careless that you got hurt like-"

"Doesn't matter," he cut her off, waving his hand dismissively. "It's about time that I'm the one that saved you anyway."

She smiled at that and couldn't resist adding, "though I have to save you back again, so that doesn't really count, does it?"

He shook his head, his blonde locks swaying gently with the movement, and he gave her a little grin, a harmless one, and as always during those rare moments, Akari marvelled at how young and how deceiving Hotaru looked when he smiled like that.

And his eyes had a different shine in them, and she found trust in there, no matter how fragile. And in those moments, Akari always wanted to hug him and whisper into his ear that she was there, she was there and she was his friend and he could trust her.

After a few moments, Akari stood, hauling the shorter boy to stand and supporting his frame as he leaned into her.

"Let's find an inn now," she said, starting to walk towards to city. "And don't forget you still have to pay for my healing."

Hotaru could hear the wink in her voice and he chuckled. "One more secret then."

And she smiled gently down at him. "One more secret it is".

end

OK, that was pretty long ;;.. now, can I hear some comments :)? .. Please :)?


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